Congratulations.

You made it. Your Lancer made it.

Despite all the simmering fear that’s begun before last work week even started, as you triumphantly penned the conclusion to The Manual from your hotel room in Carpinteria, you are here.

Safe in Best Buy.

Fried, but alive.

I hope a Santa Barbara cobb salad awaits you. Or something even tastier.

I’m writing this from the Donahue Starbucks, and I’m sure that a day from now, when I open my laptop in the Zen Den, I may be struck by some annoying emails. But the feelings will pass.

This giant blue building is a safe haven. When you pass beneath the giant yellow price tag, you’re safe. You’re safe when you read this right now. You’re safe when you read this a month from now.

And tomorrow, you shall write like the wind.

Here is the face of the guy who finished THE MANUAL after he finished THE MANUAL.

WHAT A FINAL SENTENCE TO THE MANUAL!!!! OH MY GOSH!!! GANE KO’D Pereira, JUSTIN KO’D TOPURIA, AND NOW I KO’D THE ENDING!

I knocked the conclusion out of the fucking park.

I contemplated not having a conclusion and just leaving it finish after the final page of the mindfulness section, like a fucking asshole.

Then I tried to pen an ending out in the common area on the second story of this hotel just now, but it was too contrived and wonky.

In the silence of my room, I found the flow state. And I produced a gem from the heart.

“You’ve shared your anxiety with me, and its my hope that I’ve now shared some of what you need to begin your healing journey. shared some healing with you.

I care about you, I love you, and you are on your way.”

“I cannot wait until the N goes back to being my personal weekender. It’ll always slick and clean again. The blue paint glows. The accents are flexed like muscles. There isn’t a single germ inside that originates from anywhere other than Gleason, Taki, Starbucks, or somewhere else. The interior is untouched from Sunday night to Saturday morning. And it reeks of artificial cherry.

It sits on the curb from Monday morning to Friday afternoon resting, like a caged beast. Waiting for my resignation forms to get submitted. Waiting to be unrestrained to just Gleason, Novato, and Marin City. Waiting to be unleashed on the world.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Luke 23:34 

I ask you to forgive them, although I am choked with rage.

Have mercy upon L. For he does not know who he is, nor what he is doing. He doesn’t know what reality is. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking or feeling.

Have mercy upon J.

For the same reason.

She has to wake up and go to bed believing she’s that personality. Part of her must be exhausted by her personality, or by what she’d call: “herself.” So aliented from spirit, from source.

They feel shitty things, and I make them feel shitty things by merely being, so they act in shitty ways to try to make me feel shitty too.

O father, have mercy upon their souls. The only pure parts of them.

For the hammer will find them too.

(Figuratively).

-Karla

I was leaving USF, at the red light where Turk cuts through Arguello Blvd and turns into Balboa.

I was a bit languid with my clutch play shifting from neutral to first and sustained a honk from a new Cadillac Escalade two cars behind me. I took off with a little pep, he passed the car between us and pulled alongside me to my left.

The windows were totally tinted out.

(FINISH)

(1st to 2nd)

There is a car on my head

“Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Art: Hamlet by John Austen, 1922

Let’s go to war